World Class Education OR Curriculum Confined Knowledge?

The perception and attitude children develop in their early years continue to support or haunt them through the later years of their lives.
In the same way, the approach and stance these kids formulate during their primary and secondary schooling directs them when they go to universities.

The latest PISA results show the UK's declining position in terms of its students' mathematical, scientific and reading abilities while Finland's claim to have a world class education system has been reinforced with the comparisons.Finland has secured the top position once again and is being closely followed by Hong Kong, China and Canada.

Peter Mortimore's article "A League Table to worry us All " gives detailed insight on UK's rankings in each domain.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2236584,00.html

Some of the issues which have been raised due to the results of this report include:

• UK's performance contrasts sharply with the rising scores in national tests such as SAT's and GCSE's even when the standards of PISA are held constant.


• Boys are outperforming girls in both Science and Maths.


• Streaming and testing regimes are proving to be less beneficial than had been estimated.


• Late compulsory starting age for school at seven is yielding much better outcomes than kindergarden schooling.

Nevertheless, critics claim that all PISA reveals is that if you cannot read the language fluently i.e have an immigrant background which a lot of students in UK do whereas Finland , Sweden, Japan and Korea have a homogeneous population you don't do particularly well at school.

This is an eye opener for many of us as it tells us that even if we are ranking very high in the world class ranking of universities we are gradually falling behind in our primary and secondary schooling.

Finnish and Swedish teachers who possess a high level of autonomy in shaping the curriculum according to their needs in comparison to our highly centralized and politically intervened one makes one ponder what we are aiming for.... world class education or curriculum confined knowledge?